The leading competitor to Goldman's GSTrUE structure, OPUS-5, added three more banks to its burgeoning ranks. As reported in today's Financial Times:

Bank of America, Credit Suisse and UBS on Wednesday said they would join a consortium of investment banks that have set up a platform to trade unregistered securities.

The announcement could jeopardise the existence of similar platforms set up by individual banks, such as the GS TrUE system launched by Goldman Sachs.

The consortium platform, first disclosed by the Financial Times in July, was initially set up by Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of New York, which acts as administrator of the system.

Members said others would likely join the platform because it would provide the most liquidity for trading and thus attract the greatest number of listings.

Is this a threat to Goldman? To some extent. But the bottom line is, however, that they've printed some pretty attractive deals with some marquee names and OPUS-5 hasn't. This doesn't mean that OPUS-5 won't get its share of deal flow, but I wouldn't be holding my breath for Goldman to be quaking in their boots. Ultimately I foresee a merger of the Wall Street exchange platforms, including Goldman and JP Morgan, into a unified private venue. I think the big loser here could be NASDAQ's Portal platform. Because if the major Wall Street firms have their own exchange to trade both new and seasoned issues, then what role does that leave for Portal? Answer: none. The Street has done a pretty good job setting up consortia to do a bunch of complex things, whether it's a low-cost electronic foreign exchange trading platform, providing prices and liquidity for credit derivative products, etc., so a multi-headed alliance around the issuance and trading of private placements is not far-fetched.

The trick is to get Goldman into the OPUS-5 fold to really put the public exchanges on their heels. Because as I've said before, the private exchange model is a real threat to the public exchanges for the cream of the new-issuance market, and having the biggest firms on the Street with aligned interests is a scary proposition for the SEC, Congress and the more heavily regulated public market platforms.